Chapter 22
PAVEL
Igor walks into my office, but I hardly notice him.
I’m behind my desk, but I’m not sitting—sitting requires a stillness I do not currently possess. The study has borne the brunt of my… I cannot even call it anger.
There have been times in my life when anger was my shadow. We walked side by side through the world, being a Useful Devil. I learned to live with that prickly, constant companion, and to wield it when needed.
This is something else. Something I don’t have a word for. Something I don’t control.
Igor keeps judgment from his face, but he sees what I’ve done already.
A glass that was in the wrong place at the wrong moment bore the brunt of it when I walked in.
Sparkling fragments now litter the rug. Then, a chair I slammed into the wall twice, not a pile of firewood.
The curtains lay in tatters on the floor.
Destruction. That is my gift. That is my purpose. My office is barely a warm-up compared to what I have planned. This was just… blowing off steam. But it did nothing but annoy me. I need to do more. Right now.
Igor closes the door behind him.
I look at him across the room and feel the thing in my chest that has been building since Vet’s voice went silent on the phone. I know what he’s going to say. “Don’t bother.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re going to tell me to be reasonable. That is not an option. So, if you don’t have anything useful to say, then don’t fucking bother me.”
Igor moves to the still-standing chair across from my desk. He sits. He folds his hands. He looks at me with the level patience of years of service and says nothing, which is its own form of argument.
I drag a hand down my face and turn away from him toward the window I’m thinking about punching. Outside, the grounds are dark, and the perimeter lights are on. Somewhere beyond the tree line, the world is continuing with the indifferent momentum it always carries.
Like none of what happened matters.
It fucking matters.
The words come out as a growl, and I don’t do anything to soften it. “He rammed the car. After the shooting. Vet was already down, and that motherfucker rammed the car. With my wife inside it. With my children inside her.”
“I know.”
“He knew she was pregnant. He had to.” The words come out through something clenched. “He knew, Igor. He’s Fedor. There’s no way he didn’t know. He chose that car on that road at that time because he knew exactly who was in it and exactly what it would do to me.”
“Yes,” Igor says. “He did. And he was right, which is the problem.”
A pause, and I can hear him deciding his angle, choosing the approach with the tactical care he applies to everything. Trouble is, I don’t fucking care what his argument is.
Igor goes on, “Because right now, Fedor has exactly what he wanted. He wanted you like this. Reactive. Running on instinct instead of intelligence. A man running on instinct makes predictable moves, and Fedor has been preparing for your predictable moves for seven years.”
I turn from the window. “What would you have me do? Absorb it. File it. Take a breath and write a strongly worded letter—”
“I would have you think.” He says it without inflection, which is more effective than if he had said it with any.
“I would have you be the man who outmaneuvered Fedor for seven years before he went to prison rather than the man Fedor is counting on you to be tonight. Be the man I came to work for, instead of an asshole who runs on Fedor’s bullshit. ”
I cross the room, and I stand behind the desk opposite Igor because I need something between me and him for his safety.
Animal, beastly logic presses forward through every rational layer I have constructed.
I don’t want to be right about what I’m going to say.
But if I am, I don’t want him in arm’s reach.
I’ll throw him out the window if I’m right. “How long?”
Igor looks at me. “How long what?”
“How long have you been feeding him information?”
His face turns to stone.
“You knew about everything. You’ve known Molly since she came to work for me.
You’re friendly with her, so you know a lot about her.
You knew we were fucking. You knew when she got pregnant.
The move to Southampton. Vet’s assignment.
You have known everything, because I have told you everything, because I trusted you. ”
Igor looks at me. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t stand. He doesn’t reach for the thing I know he carries, because every man in my organization does.
He simply looks at me, and what is in that look is something I have never been the recipient of—a look I have seen him level at other men. Dead men.
The look lasts approximately four seconds.
Then it passes, and Igor’s face returns to its composure, and he says nothing at all.
And even with his lack of argument, the guilt swamps me. “Igor.” My voice has changed. The animal has retreated far enough that what is left sounds like me, or closer to me than the last several minutes have produced. “I—”
“You are in pain. You are frightened for your wife and your children, and you are running on no sleep and dwelling in the fury of a man who has been hit somewhere he cannot protect. I understand all of that.” A stiff pause. “Do not do it again.”
“I won’t.” The words land in the room with the weight they deserve. “I know it wasn’t you—I knew it while I was saying it, and I said it anyway, which is shitty of me. I’m sorry.”
Igor receives the apology in his way, just a simple nod. Then he leans forward in the chair. “Kozlovsky’s widow.”
The name lands like a fist. “What are you talking about?”
“You remember what happened,” he says.
“Everyone remembers what happened. Why bring her up now?”
“After Kozlovsky was gone, Fedor didn’t need to do anything else—the threat was neutralized, the point had been made, there was nothing left to prove. Kozlovsky was dead. Tortured to death. His body left on the courthouse steps to make sure every wound was accounted for, public knowledge—”
“I am aware. So what?”
“And then Fedor had his widow tortured for three days. Not for information. Not for leverage. Not for anything strategic or useful or even particularly logical. Just to prove that he could. Just to demonstrate to everyone watching that this is what the aftermath looks like when you move against him.”
I swallow. The rumors of what was done to her… I can’t help but think of Molly like that, and it only fuels my fire. “What the fuck is your point, Igor?”
He holds my gaze without flinching. “Molly is alive. The babies are alive. She’s in a hospital where Fedor cannot reach her tonight.
If you go after him now, in the state you’re in, with the scale you’re contemplating—you will give him every justification he needs to do to her what he did to Kozlovsky’s widow.
And this time, it won’t be three days. He will take weeks with Molly because of what you did to him. ”
The silence in the room is complete.
I stand behind my desk and feel the image of what Igor has just described move through me. It’s worse than the thing I have been carrying since the phone call.
It’s worse because he’s right. That is precisely what he’d do.
“He knows I’m the reason he was in prison. He might do worse… If I’m dead, he might demand her in his bed. Use the kids as leverage…”
Igor nods once again. He sees it too. “You well know how fucked up his imagination is, Pavel.”
Too many thoughts crash in my brain, and all of them add up to one thing. “She deserves better than this. Better than me.”
“She does. She deserves a life that does not include hospital rooms and bodyguards. But she chose this life. She chooses to be by your side. You must respect her choice.”
“She’s carrying my children in a world that is trying to kill her because of me.
Because of what I am. Because of decisions I made before she existed in my life, and that I would unmake if I could, and cannot.
” I look at the window, at the dark grounds and the perimeter lights.
“Sister Mary Patrick could take her. Take her and the children when they come and build something for them that I’m not in the middle of. ”
Igor is quiet for a moment. “That is an option.”
“But.”
“But it’s not the best one.” He meets my eyes directly.
“The best option is you. You, with your wits about you, which you are capable of, which I have watched you demonstrate in circumstances that would have broken most men. You, intact and intelligent and thinking rather than burning. That is what keeps her safe. Not your absence. Your presence.”
I look at him across the desk.
“She did not marry an absence,” Igor says. “She married you. Come back to us, Pavel. We need you here. With us.”
His words settle something inside of me, and things feel less pressurized. I’m still furious. The fury is not gone and will not be gone. But now, I might use it.
“She’s safe. Tonight. In the hospital.”
“Yes,” Igor confirms.
“That buys us time.”
“It does.”
I think about that, and Molly’s words ring in my ears. “She yelled at me. She never yells at me. ‘Get your shit together.’ Can you believe that?”
He allows for a smirk. A small one. “Was she wrong?”
“That’s the worst part of all of this. She’s never wrong. I should have married a moron. It would have been easier.”
He snorts. “You’ve never liked easy.”
I think about the fact that I left instead of getting my shit together, which is a failure of an unambiguous kind that I will have to account for, and that I will, because she is owed that much.
“If anything else happens to her—if any harm comes to her or to the children that I could have prevented—I will burn every consideration to the ground and let the consequences sort themselves out in the aftermath.”
“And I will be by your side. Like you said, she deserves better.”
An ugly plan solidifies in my mind. “We do this right. We do it carefully and thoroughly, and we do it in a way that ends it, not a way that escalates it into something none of us survives.” I look at Igor’s reflection in the dark glass of the window. “But we do it.”
“Where do we start?”
Inside, Igor helps me iron out the wrinkles in my plan. Outside, Fedor is somewhere in the city drawing his next breath.
One of his last.